Les Girls

I came across a collection of cigarette-card photographs of dancers from 1939 at a car boot sale in summer 2005. I immediately knew I wanted to recreate all of the photographs, as faithfully as I could, using myself as the model. From the outset, this project was really about the impossibility of becoming someone else by entering a photograph of them. In so doing I am able to represent my own desire to explore another identity or story. It is not particularly my intention to present myself in a certain way, but to explore a kind of wish fulfilment, to follow the question, ‘What if I were this person in the photograph?’ I anticipated slippage. My costume and hair would never be quite right. The lighting would be wrong. My photographs would fail. However, I have sought out the best wigs, scoured theatre wardrobes, costume hire shops and ebay for the most accurate outfits, added my own sequins by hand, had leotards specifically made. I have bought memoirs and souvenir programmes from the period to find out more about the working lives of jobbing dancers. I watched dozens of Hollywood musicals from the 20’s through to the 50’s in order to understand the styles. I have consulted lighting and theatre technicians for advice on the lighting. I returned to using black & white film and fibre based paper in order to render the most authentic tones. Despite all this, there is slippage. But I control the slippage. It comes through subtly; my inward smile, nose ring, body shape and other inaccuracies reveal themselves slowly, pointing to the contemporary nature of the photographs. They are products of the present but also have their own provenance, accrued from my insistence on authenticity in their making. This stance takes on greater significance when considered in opposition to the speed of production and proliferation of digital images. The cigarette cards themselves were objects to be held, looked at closely. They were private cards to view, collect and exchange. As enclosures in cigarette packs in the 1930s and 40s, it would have been presumed that these were gifts for a male consumer. The distance of time has created a very different reading of these photographs. Looking at them with contemporary eyes, they look glamorous, innocent, staged and seductive. Low key Hollywood portraits with hair lights are called to mind. I long to be in these photographs. However, my readings of the images are inaccurate.